Silenced and Divided by Sensibilities

The Trump yard signs and banners I see only when I leave the metropolitan area where I live and work remind me that Americans were once expected to engage, debate, and persuade and that liberals were once openly in favor of certain values and goals.

Conservatives of all stripes are increasingly barred from speaking freely on campus, online, or at work. On the left, only extremists can be open about their beliefs. Climate change zealots, sexual deviants, Hamas supporters, and high-tax Stalinists can be open about their beliefs but together they are a small minority of the Democratic (or just anti-conservative) vote. Most Democrats (like conservatives in blue states) are defined by what they believe but cannot say.

You could be a Democrat (or even a conservative) if:

• You think that it is perverse for drag queens to do kindergarten storybook hour. You resent the fact that your daughter’s high school track team lost medals to a biological male. But you can’t say so because you might be called “__phobic” and be lumped in with the Religious Right.
• You think that it is appalling that rapists, murderers, and violent rioters are given light sentences or not prosecuted at all, but you do not want to be called a law-and-order racist.
• You hate the rising cost of energy. You are tired of bogus climate catastrophe predictions and the absurd traffic blocking or art destruction by pompous greenies, but you must not appear to oppose the moral duty to Save the Planet.
• You can see the cost, national decline, and chaos from open borders, but if you protest out loud they might call you a xenophobic MAGA racist.
• Your kids’ history texts are openly anti-American, their sex ed openly perverse, school discipline is gone and you hate all of that, but if you complain you are a right-wing racist, “Christianist” nutball.

The dominant elite sensibility wants to be (or at least appear to be) kind, ethical, and open-minded but has instead become the Orwellian Party’s bitch. When we accept that some ideas cannot be expressed, it is a short walk to the place where they cannot be thought at all. How did we reach this state of affairs?

I suggest that our predominant nominal sensibilities (e.g., respect, kindness, conservation, opposition to racism, etc) emerged from a shared moral culture under the heavy influence of Western religious and philosophical traditions. But when that grounding is dissolved and all that's left is a set of increasingly vague sensibilities, those vestigial sensibilities can be easily bullied. Lenin and Hitler easily brushed aside nice guys in periods of cultural decline and moral confusion.

The cultural battle of the moment is less about persuasion than about creating spaces where the commonalities of 80-90% of Americans can be freely shared and maybe rediscover our roots and identity as a people in the process. Guys like Trump and Rush Limbaugh defy The Party but it will take more than hard-won pockets of defiance to restore the American way of life.